Waukee nears completion of new Northwest High School Sarah Kay LeBlanc, Des Moines Register Almost every feature of the upcoming Northwest High School in Waukee was built with expansion in mind. When it opens in the fall, it will immediately house 1,300 10- through 12-grade students. The building can easily fit 2,000 students, though, the district's Chief Operating Officer Kirk Johnson said, and within a couple of years, it will have to. For the last several years, the Waukee school district has been growing from the bottom up. This year's graduating class is about 780, but the new high school wasn't built for them. It was built for the 1,000 first-graders coming up through the ranks of the district and with the expectation that the district will add more than 3,000 students over the next five years.